Gibburt

When it comes to the current financial crisis, one thing that has really struck me is just how readily and insouciantly many in positions of authority have performed an ideological u-turn. Bankers and businessmen suddenly started calling for more market regulation, previously staunchly neoliberal governments were happy to oblige, and Karl Marx, whom until recently only embittered Socialist Workers’ Party functionaries would have invoked without embarassment, has somehow become quite fashionable again.

It seems to me that there are two basic explanations for this phenomenon. The first one is that the crisis has made the elites of our Western societies realize they’d been tragically mistaken for the past few decades and made them re-embrace ideas they’d dismissed for all the wrong reasons. The other, admittedly more cynical, explanation is that it’s all just pure opportunism. Banks and businesses want to save their own skin, governments want to be perceived as fighting for the common man, and the intelligentsia are happy that they once again have some use for the collection of Socialist writings they’d accumulated in their youth.

To find out which of these alternatives is correct, we only have to wait until the storm has blown over. My prediction is that then we’ll once again hear cries for “risking more freedom” and that newspaper columns will tout the unexpected renaissance of Milton Friedman.

Filed under: Politics by Ralf Damaschke | Social tagging: financial crisis > Karl Marx > opportunism